This is something we hope to change with the first Knight Mozilla news innovation challenge topic. We’re inviting hacks and hackers from around the world to answer the question: how can new web video tools transform news storytelling? People with the best ideas will get to bring them to life with a full year paid fellowship in a world leading newsroom.

The next ‘montage moment’

What do I mean by transform storytelling? Just that: taking today’s online video tools beyond the mechanical and obvious, bringing people, ideas and events to life in ways we haven’t seen before. To get your imagination going, think back to how visual storytelling emerged in the world of cinema.

It took 25 years for Eisenstein to grab hold of this technical wonder and then say: wow, I bet you we could tell a more powerful story if we varied the shots a bit and then edited them together. With Potemkin, he invented the visual language we still use to tell stories today: montage.

The fundamental technology didn’t change in those 25 years. The Lumiere’s knew how to splice film and move the camera around. Eisenstein’s breakthrough was to use basic film technology to tell a story in a new and creative way. Which is very much like where we are at with web native video today: huge technological potential just waiting to be seized for creative storytelling. What we need now is a ‘montage moment’ for the web era.

Open video: a huge palette of awesomeness

The potential of web native <video> truly is awesome: we can now link any frame within any video to any other part of the web. This was hard to do in the world of Flash video. The introduction of the HTML5 <video> tag over the last two years has made it easy.

The same tools have been used to show how transcripts can be used to search and then navigate immediately to anywhere within a long clip. This demo from Danish public radio shows how this can work with web native <audio>. The same thing could easily be done with video.

Of course, the big potential is in connecting video to the massive amount media and data that already exists all across the web. Imagine if you could weave the sum of all human knowledge seamlessly into your news story or documentary. That’s now possible. This book report demo shows the basics concept, with a student connecting her narration to wikipedia articles and news reports.

We’re hoping that you — or someone you know — is up to this challenge. If you think you are, you should enter the MoJo innovation challenge. All you need to do is: draw up a napkin sketch showing how you might tell a story in a new way with open video, write a brief paragraph about it and then submit it online. If your idea is solid, you’ve got a good chance at a fellowship where you could actually bring it to life at the Al Jazeera, BBC, the Guardian, Die Zeit or the Boston Globe. Who knows, maybe you could be the Eisenstein of open video?

I’m very happy to announce that Brett Gaylor officially joined the Mozilla Drumbeat team earlier this month. He’ll be playing the role of project producer — leading his own Web Made Movies project and helping to find new Drumbeat projects over time. Brett will also be directing a documentary series about Mozilla and the future of the web.

Photo: CC-BY, Joi Ito

Brett’s already made great strides setting up the Web Made Movies lab initiative with Seneca College. The idea is to get filmmakers and web developers collaborating on new tech tools that shape what cinema will look like on the open web. The first project coming out of this lab is popcorn.js, which was demo’ed in early alpha at Whistler. A polished version of that demo is here:

Also, Brett has started work on a documentary where Mozillians will paint a picture of the open web that we’re building. He interviewed about a dozen people at Whistler and has a number of other shoots set up. Footage and a call for participation will start leaking out through the fall, with first episodes or edited clips coming by the end of the year.

For those haven’t heard of Brett before: he is the director of RIP: A Remix Manifesto, an awesome film on copyright and culture that has been broadcast in over 20 countries and seen by millions He also founded OpenSourceCinema.org, an experiment in applying open source principles to filmmaking which was used to get thousands of people to contribute to the making of RIP. In many ways, Web Made Movies is a continuation of the Open Source Cinema experiment.

I’ve been meaning to blog about Web Made Movies for a while now. It’s one of the early Drumbeat projects I’m most excited about. One reason is the pitch: “A documentary about the future of the web, told by the people of the web.” But I’m also excited by the proposed partnership between filmmakers (submitting footage and episodes) and hackers (creating innovative HTML5 video interfaces). The idea is not only to create an online documentary series, but also invent an open source approach to cinema.

Brett posted a teaser videoblog on Friday (above), prompting me to put fingers to keyboard. The teaser is mostly an invitation to participate by submitting story ideas. We’re looking for examples of new internet technology, applications or content that will shape the open web of the future. Brett (and probably Henrik) will be blogging on the story framework soon. But it would be great to get your suggestions now if ideas are already popping to mind.

The first big opportunities for participation will be the pilot episode and a ‘future of the video player’ design challenge.

Shooting has already begun on the pilot episode, including interviews with Local Motors, Iranian bloggers, Brasilian computer recyclers and (hopefully) Johnathan Zittrain. If you have stories or footage to contribute, we can roll them in.

The design challenge will start later in April, and will unfold over the next couple of months. It’ll provide a chance for people to brainstorm cool HTML5 video use cases and then to submit design mockups that combine the best use cases.

The pilot episode plus leading design sketches should be ready for public consumption in June. See the Web Made Movies roadmap for more info.

As I blogged the other day, I’ve been asking people for ideas on the ‘movie about the web, by the web‘ concept. One of my thought experiments was to simply ask people: what does the web mean to you? I edited the answers together as quick video poem just to see what it felt like.

In some ways, the result is a bit schmultzy. But there is a nice affirmation also: people are totally ready to talk eloquently about very big ideas about the web. This is a good thing as the goal is to make a massively collaborative movie that helps people understand the web and why the fact that it’s open matters so much. It think the citizens of the web are more than ready to pitch in to do this.

If anyone’s interested, I’d love to see other clips responding to the ‘what does the web mean to you?’ question. Just you talking. Or you and your friends. You can just paste links below as comments. It’ll keep the thought experiment going.